"flash" entries

High-performing memory throws many traditional decisions overboard

Over the past decade, SSD drives (popularly known as Flash) have radically changed computing at both the consumer level — where USB sticks have effectively replaced CDs for transporting files — and the server level, where it offers a price/performance ratio radically different from both RAM and disk drives. But databases have just started to catch up during the past few years. Most still depend on internal data structures and storage management fine-tuned for spinning disks.

Citing price and performance, one author advised a wide range of database vendors to move to Flash. Certainly, a database administrator can speed up old databases just by swapping out disk drives and inserting Flash, but doing so captures just a sliver of the potential performance improvement promised by Flash. For this article, I asked several database experts — including representatives of Aerospike, Cassandra, FoundationDB, RethinkDB, and Tokutek — how Flash changes the design of storage engines for databases. The various ways these companies have responded to its promise in their database designs are instructive to readers designing applications and looking for the best storage solutions.

A good match for the similarly unexpected Web?

JavaScript’s ever-growing importance still takes people by surprise. Every time I post about things JavaScript makes possible, I get pushback from people who refuse to be impressed by JavaScript. Why? Because it isn’t what they wanted.

In the course of a week, I get to hear from different quarters about how JavaScript is half Lisp, and terrible either because it dares to be half-Lisp or because it only manages to be half Lisp. Similarly, as functional programming has become more visible, I’ve heard more from people who think JavaScript programming is too functional or not functional enough. People disappointed in JavaScript because it doesn’t have strong typing are a constant, as are people who find prototypal inheritance perverse. JavaScript syntax—I’m sure someone must like it.

It’s tempting to tell the story of JavaScript as a series of historical accidents. Brendan Eich put together LiveScript, applying a variety of techniques to meet a particular set of needs quickly. Since then, we’ve been dealing with JavaScript’s shift from a simple object manipulation language to a much broader and more powerful toolkit, unable to change approach because of the unique dynamics of the browser world.

Flash ditches Linux, a developer faces death, and we get a peek inside Foxconn.

If you use Linux, either start using Chrome as your browser or get ready to give up Flash. A developer faces execution in Iran because of how someone used software he wrote, and the world gets to see what it's like to build iPads and iPhones.

How The Internet Gets Inside Us (The New Yorker) — at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind. (via Tom Armitage)

It was a good year for mobile, HTML5, Drupal and Hadoop.

It's time for our annual look back at the year that was, when mobile ruled the world, HTML5 PWNED Flash, Drupal and Hadoop were the hot buzzwords for your resume, and a new batch of languages tried to become stars.

Flash isn't dead, but Adobe is checking into hospice options. Eclipse adds another language to the list of ones almost but not exactly like Java. And how do you find good programmers? Probably not with brainteasers.

As HTML5 matures, the overlap between the new standard and Flash becomes a point of examination (or contention, depending on your perspective). In this interview, Adobe technical evangelist and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Duane Nickull says the real issue isn't which option is better, but rather how developers are best served.

Facebook Scraping, Law Code, AppEngine in Javascript, and Flash Visualization

Facebook Changes Crawling Policy (for the better) — they’re implementing their crawling policy in robots.txt and not in additional contractual terms. This is in response to Pete Warden pointing out that robots.txt is industry standard and will avoid confusion such as landed him with large lawyer bills. This change came from Bret Taylor, their CTO, who was product manager for Google Maps and gets working sanely with developers. (via Pete Warden)

Law as Source Code (Sean McGrath) — there’s something important coming together in his series of blog posts about law. What we have here are two communities that work with insanely large, complex corpora of text that must be rigorously managed and changed with the utmost care, precision and transparency of intent. Yet, the software community has a much greater set of tools at its disposal to help out.

Featured Video

The growing role of software architects: “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing," says Neal Ford, software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks.